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By What Authority?

When you start out in your life, you have no conception of right and wrong, for the same reason you don’t understand string theory. Babies start out with the absolute minimum of knowledge to live. Just as you had to learn to tie your shoes, you had to learn the difference between right and wrong. There are things you should not do and things you should not say. Similarly, there are things you should say or do. Morality is the set of social rules you initially learn from your family and then from your community.

Morality comes from authority. The reason why you accept the moral instruction of your parents is they are your parents. It may be that you are programmed to accept them as moral authorities or simply that they are the default moral authorities in your life as you grow up. Similarly, maybe you accept the morality of your community, because it is what your parents accept. If there is a conflict between what you learn at home versus what you learn outside, you have to decide who is the moral authority.

This is what experts and theologians call “the obvious.” Morality is the code of conduct of your community. For most of human history, the moral authority was the religion of the people. The holy men of the religion, perhaps relying on an oral tradition or written texts, would shape and enforce the moral code of the people..The check on the holy man was that everyone knew the rules and the source of the rules, things like stories and legends, so he could not just wing it. He had to live within the code too.

Again, this is all obvious stuff, but it is worth remembering when thinking about the de-platforming and censorship efforts. Here is a story about the battle going on with Patreon, the fundraising site used by “content creators.” The site has been purging even people mildly skeptical of the Progressive project and that has resulted in some big names like Sam Harris leaving the platform. The Times reporter spoke with the “head of trust and safety” for the company and this is the important bit from the story.

“Jaqueline Hart, Patreon’s head of trust and safety, said her team watches for and will investigate complaints about any content posted on Patreon and on other sites like YouTube and Facebook that violates what it defines as hate speech. That includes “serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation,” she has said.”

Now, everyone with the slightest awareness knows that the rules with regards to “negative generalizations” apply only to non-whites. The people who rule over us want to make it illegal to notice any differences between whites and non-whites, so noticing is strictly prohibited. The exception is non-whites say what they want or even call for harm against white males. It’s why white males in TV ads and in movies are always the bad guy or the bungler, while non-whites are brave and wise.

That bit of hypocrisy has become so internalized that even the steam whistles of cable chat shows don’t bother mentioning it. The more important question is upon what authority did it become immoral to make “negative generalizations” about anyone? It’s certainly not coming from Christian authorities. In fact, the Abrahamic religions are chock full of “negative generalizations” about all sorts of people. Up until fairly recent, the basis of comedy was “negative generalizations of race and sexual orientation.”

It’s one of those things that just seems to happen in late empire America. The usual pattern is a call for tolerance, which quickly becomes intolerance of the lack of tolerance and then finally, the enshrinement of the minority view or identity as a holy item. To paraphrase Chris Caldwell, we quickly go from a situation where the new anti-white identity is too weak to end special protections to a situation where the new anti-white identity is too strong to challenge the special protections.

Again, how does this happen? By what authority are these people deciding that it is not permissible to question the moral superiority of people based on “their race or sexual orientation?” This question is never posed to people like Jaqueline Hart of Patreon and she would never expose herself to people who would dare question her authority on these matters. In fact, our friends the Bible believing Christians never question it either, despite that fact that Jesus was a guy fond of asking these sorts of questions.¹

That said, you get the sense that the people demanding the rest of us abide by this new morality know they lack the moral authority. This video, by a popular YouTuber, where he recounts his conversation with Jacqueline Hart, is instructive. At one point, she hints that Patreon is being forced by their “partners” to purge people. The implication is that the banks are really behind this effort. When pressed on it she changes the subject. What she is doing is conjuring a authority to justify her actions.

This is instructive and something dissidents should train themselves to press whenever dealing with the Left. In the work setting, for example, diversity training should always be referred to as moral instruction. It’s a subtle thing that is effective at letting normal people know that they are being preached to be people who see themselves as our moral superiors. It nibbles away at the false consensus and plants a seed of doubt about whose authority upon which these new moral codes rest.

That’s the important aspect of all radicalism, especially American Progressivism. It is just an appeal to mob rule when you dig into it. They browbeat people into conforming to some new moral code and then point to public acceptance of it as their source of moral authority when called on it. It’s why vinegar drinking scolds like Jacqueline Hart decorate their sermons with the word “community” all the time. The enforced conformity is the only moral authority they have to support their codes of conduct.

People only have the authority of you that you wish to grant them.
I take great delight in telling local authority/council types and jobsworths that I do not consent nor grant them any authority over me.

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8 months ago

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Simon

I meant “over you”

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8 months ago

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BestGuest

I respectfully disagree. If you run a business access to lines of credit are essential. On the consumer side of things, soon you may not be able to purchase certain items (firearms, for example) if the credit card companies and the Banksters behind them don’t wish you to. Just wait until they get rid of cash!

I wish Leftists read something other than “Harry Potter” every now and again — they might come across Rousseau’s “general will,” which is really what they mean when they set up these specious appeals to the mob. With the added bonus, of course, that Robespierre isn’t sending you to the guillotine as an inconvenience — you’re actually guillotining *yourself*, for the greater glory of the Revolution.

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8 months ago

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DeBeers Diamonds

The storyline of the Harry Potter series is that blood purity is a farce, and Voldemort is driven by “hapa rage”. The irony is that magicians in the series are in essence a “different species”. One would typically expect that the “magician gene” would have twice the effect if you get a copy from both parents. The hot feminist magician also inexplicably ends up with a beta male.

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8 months ago

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BadThinker

To be fair she spends a lot of time with an alpha sports superstar before settling for the beta…

As for the blood purity stuff, inbreeding does some pretty terrible things in reality too. You need a sufficiently large gene pool and the crazier magicians did not have that.

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8 months ago

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Dutch

When I see the word “community” in that kind of context, I hear Jesse Jackson saying “coh-MEWN-ah-tea”. Then I laugh the laugh of the condemned.

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8 months ago

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DeBeers Diamonds

The typical Silicon Valley worker, to the extent that they pay attention to politics, is far more aggressive than the oligarchs running the industry. It is a widespread belief that Zuckerberg put “profits ahead of safety” , allowing the KGB to rile up racial tensions by spending a few thousand on ads. What the oligarchs fear above all else is unionization by their radicalized workers, which would be a world-breaking event. The techie scum have the same cost of living and student debt problems as their Millennial peers, the traditional path of Silicon Valley wealth is stock options, not salary/benefits.

If you live in the SF Bay Area, a $150k income is considered roughly middle class while a $100k income is poor AF.

But the real threat of unions is not challenges to pay scale, it’s challenges to things like insane hours, absurdly expansive NDA/NCA/WFH clauses, HR inquisitions, outsourcing/offshoring and so on. Big tech is truly a gilded cage.

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8 months ago

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DeBeers Diamonds

Tech oligarchs often claim that they need the “synergy” of having their employees working and living in the same neighborhood as other techie scum. Of course, these same people were caught colluding to suppress wages some years ago.

I’d take these people seriously if they opened offices in Lagos Prime and Lagos on the Chesapeake. Strangely they never do.

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8 months ago

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Drake

I hope that it’s their downfall. When I hear a high priest of progressiveness invoking “community” I think “not my community”. Turning everyone else against whites and preaching this “community” nonsense will just accelerate the disintegration of the empire into small pieces.

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8 months ago

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DeBeers Diamonds

Campus conservatives are rarely lauded by university administrators as part of the “wonderful tapestry of diversity”. There’s something to be said that we should push to be given a place on the tapestry, as no amount of “civic nationalism” will ever get most non-whites to identify with Dinesh-tier Eurocentrism.

That,s it. Communism/liberalism goes always worse. When you remember, then Soviet Union went down not by elections but when liberals lost patience and brought tanks onto streets. Trump tactics seems to be rise tensions until liberals do something desperate and terrible . Then average Joe freaks out and agrees that some liberal control measures are justified.

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8 months ago

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Carl B.

Look forward to the day the Progs are introduced to the “Community Of Lead.”

Our Founders had always understood that the citizens were members of multitudinous corporate communities of interest. If you found the people around you objectionable, you could move to a community more congenial to your habits. But our modern Solons have decreed this to be immoral. They demand conformity. They insist upon the acceptance of every perversion. Mob rule is the new enforcement. But they are not content with this. They insist on brainwashing every law officer, every soldier, and every lawgiver. These people want the kind of power only the gods possess. Hubris, methinks.

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8 months ago

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Babe Ruthless

They don’t want to leave you an out, either. Think they’ll let you escape from the horrors of the public sphere in movies, computer games, or fast food? Wrong. All dripping with left-wing propaganda. Religion? My local church has gone full globohomo.

Their totalitarianism is like a gangster roaming “his” neighborhood, daring anyone to look him in the eye. I suspect only radical measures can fix it now. Whatever comes, it’s important to remain in your heart a stone-cold atheist to their nasty and untrue death cult.

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8 months ago

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BestGuest

I don’t know how old anyone who posts on this board (or any other) is. But the “long march” through the institutions began long before many of us were born. We live with the fallout. I’m not sure if we reclaim the institutions or let the existing ones die and start new ones. Maybe we won’t even have a choice and our beliefs will have to go underground.

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8 months ago

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Juri

I am 43. Born and lived in the Soviet Union 16 years. You can not reclaim your institutions. The only thing you can do is what we did. Forget old institutions and build up liberal proof new ones. Our institutions fell in the 1917, your ones 1968. Merry Christmas from 100% white Eastern European country.

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8 months ago

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Range Front Fault

Juri…..thanks for your very interesting input due to your experience and thoughtful analysis. A good and Happy New Year to you. Look forward to more of your observations. Be safe.

This is an instance in which accelerationism is the correct response for the political right. The right lent their political support to large corporations for decades, and in to show their gratitude all large corporations have completely allied with the left. I hope right-leaning attorneys in Oregon sue the **** out of corporations resident and/or doing business in Oregon.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

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Citizen of a Silly Country

But “community” is a very powerful word/idea to whites who, generally, lack community. We were in charge for so long that our natural tendency is to look at positions of authority – government officials, police, corporations, church leaders, etc. – as “our” community because, of course, they were. We didn’t need a separate community outside of general society because that was our community and its authorities were presumed to be on our side. Other groups – especially our friends the Jews – understood implicitly that there were two communities at play: 1) Their own ethnic community to which they were… Read more »

I sometimes wish I were not such a hermit. I enjoy the occasional opportunity to verbalize my crimethink, in safe environments, of course. Sometimes people just need permission to agree with us. Be “a safe space” for bad Whites. If you trigger a shite lib, that is fun too.

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Citizen of a Silly Country

I find that most upper-middle class whites – my neighbors and friends – are hopeless. They earn enough money to insulate themselves so they can ignore reality. Indeed, the main threat to their world is getting caught saying the wrong thing so best to not even think the wrong thoughts. Reality will need to get much closer to these people before they wake up. That said, they mostly know how I think so I’m fairly out in the open. It actually confuses some of them because I’m generally a good husband, father, neighbor and friend. I mean, how can a… Read more »

“I mean, how can a “nice, normal” guy have such terrible thoughts.” I live in Asia. Almost all the whites I encounter are good whites. They just assume I am one of their ilk because I am bright and extremely well read. When they find out that I am a bad white, they are shocked because anyone who doesn’t mindlessly spout the narrative du jour is a stupid bigot. Good whites are definitely herd animals who seek desperately the status being a good white conveys. One of their greatest fears is being thought a bad white and losing all of… Read more »

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UpYours

Training their H1B replacement will wake the upper middle class cubicle drones up real fast. It happened to the code monkey crowd in the 2000’s after they thought that they were immune from the offshoring of blue collar American jobs in the 80’s and 90’s. Many of them, the older ones at least were red-pilled and stopped their lolbertarian delusions very quickly.

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TomA

In post complex language evolutionary time, there arose a fitness advantage to the acquisition of wisdom and it’s transmission to succeeding generations. Eventually, this mechanism of postpartum wisdom transfer became ritualized via religious practices and the device of “moral authority” was really just shorthand for established or time-tested wisdom. The reason for variance in religious dictums was simply a reflection of the reality that what was wise in one particular environment was not necessarily the optimal guidance or ranking in another environment.

Z: “In the work setting, for example, diversity training should always be referred to as moral instruction.” This can be expressed to coworkers with sarcasm or straight. If you have the ability to pull it off, play it straight like a true believer, as it will have more impact by causing coworkers (even Lefty ones) to see that creepy brainwashing is back. Using the term while in the HR office would be especially rich, since she’d call you on your sarcasm, but you’ll stay in character and turn it around on her by defending “the people in charge of this… Read more »

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Alex

Almost makes me wish I still worked in corporate America so I could do this.

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Larkin Lover

Well I suppose human affairs are always like that, the progressives are not a recent exception. A ruling elite enforces a consensus through power and propaganda. I notice other people in my professional life are incredibly persuaded by authority, accepting blatant hypocracy from administrators. I’m not and am often critical of authority, but I seem perhaps to have an oppositional personality, so it may be that I myself am pathological. In times past elite consensus tended to be formed around direct military control, as with Manchus in China or various empires, but later financial power, as with planters in the… Read more »

It’s a subtle thing that is effective at letting normal people know that they are being preached to be people who see themselves as our moral superiors.

A phrase I use a lot these days is: “Are you sure you’d not be better off going to church?”

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FaCubeItches

“At one point, she hints that Patreon is being forced by their “partners” to purge people. The implication is that the banks are really behind this effort. When pressed on it she changes the subject. What she is doing is conjuring a authority to justify her actions.”

I read Matt’s transcript a few days ago. It’s really difficult to make sense of any of it. Jacqueline jackknifes between two incompatible positions: “we made and 100% support this decision” vs. “the banks are making us”. My attempt to read between the lines: Financial institutions are enforcing a “moral liability” analogous to legal liability, in that if your company is found to be negligent in policing the narrative, you will suffer very steep financial penalties up to and including the complete deplatforming of your entire business. That’s why she can insist that _formally_ it is Patreon’s decision, but in… Read more »

I can speak with some knowledge to this. The contracts between Patreon and it’s financial service providers must include clauses making Patreon absolutely liable for any and all trouble the banks might get into by servicing Patreon. The possibility of money laundering, payments to state designated bad guys, etc. makes this inevitable.

Following the modern corporate variant on the Hippocratic Oath (“First, incur no liability.”) Patreon wouldn’t need anything like direct instructions from the banks to purge anyone that might be “problematic” (God, I hate that word.)

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Doctor Right

I’m a Bible-believing Christian. Leviticus 19:15 hit me in the head some years ago – it advises us not to pervert justice by favoring the poor, among other groups. What is cultural Marxism but favoring various groups solely on the basis of their group identity? It is thus perverted justice. I am not enjoined to make myself subservient to anyone or any group, and I am told not to favor them over others. I’d be perfectly happy with ‘do unto others’, but nowadays I’m part of the group being done to.

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Tekton

You didn’t answer your question. By whose authority? You referenced the passage in Mark where the Jews asked of Jesus the same question. He did not answer them either. Wait, are you saying….? Nah. I guess your point was that “you decide who is the moral authority.” So that is exactly in line with the Left’s moral relativism. Yes? No. As a “Bible believing Christian” myself (is there some other kind?), I know this is a false paradigm. I also know why Christ refused the answer the Pharisees. They did not believe him in the first place and clearly understood… Read more »

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Tom

S’truth. May I offer a seasonal balance to “Peace on earth”
“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division…. Luke 12 : 51
Let them stumble over Romans 13 all they want.
a bibleater

Exactly! The Left has neither authority nor foundation for any of its moral claims. In spite of that, it manages to beat the Right over and over at the game of seizing the moral high ground because it has mastered the art of manipulating the moral emotions. There is a big difference between morality and custom. Some social rules belong in the latter category, such as driving on the right side of the street. Genuinely moral behavior, however, implies an emotional, or innate, base. It is not infinitely malleable, as once claimed by the Blank Slaters. See, for example, “Just… Read more »

I’m not following you here. You say the left uses the illusion of objective morality to win, but the right loses because of a belief in objective morality (from religion). I don’t understand the distinction you’re making.

Even if you wanted to say morality is an evolutionary consequence it doesn’t mean anything. Being a rapist is probably due to evolutionary pressures as well. Just because something existed and had evolutionary purposes doesn’t tell us whether it should exist today or be considered moral.

Who do you see in the ascendant today in the U.S./Europe, the Left or Christianity? From where I’m standing, the Left is running rings around traditional religions in these areas, with the exception of Islam. Their solution to the Christian version of objective morality has been simple – Gleichschaltung. The mainstream churches today from the Southern Baptists to the Catholics have become little more than leftist political clubs. The process is more advanced in Europe than here, but the trend is obvious. When it comes to manipulating moral emotions, the Left has run rings around the traditional Christian sects. For… Read more »

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pyrrhus

It is definitely not true that all morality is learned…Much research shows that at least 50% of all behavior and attitudes are genetic, probably more..Think about it, most morality is based on treating people in ways that will promote the survival of your hunter/gatherer group or tribe…It’s not arbitrary.

However: current evidence strongly disfavors the “group evolutionary strategy” hypothesis. Personal morality can be better explained by the concept of reciprocal altruism – expecting something in return for your good deeds, either resources or status/power that can be leveraged for resources.

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sirlancelot

We have given these lunatics the authority !

Went on a big rant about the muslim and african invasion but had to delete it for brevity.

A young boy was raped here recently and now a young child has been murdered on Christmas Eve.

It kills me to see my own people committing suicide.

God help us

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UpYours

Take care of yourself and your loved ones, and consign the rest to hell. If people are intent on jumping off a cliff, you cannot stop them. The best you can do is to ensure that you and your family do not get pulled into the abyss along with them.

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Watauga

The entire universe–the matter of authority, included–is subject to one simple question: Does God exist (i.e., does His authority exist, handed down from Him in His Word)? It is a simple, either/or question. Either God exists or He does not. Either His authority functions in this world or it does not. For the believing Christian, ALL AUTHORITY flows from God through His Word (through Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh). Either His Commandments, as restated by Christ, operate to rule the world or they do not. We are either saved through faith in Christ or we are not. All of… Read more »

I’d have thought an HBD maven like you would have taken more seriously the evidence that preschoolers have innate concepts of property ownership and fairness. Indeed chimps show behaviour indicating concepts of rights to property and fairness in dealings, I assume nobody here is imagining they’ve thrashed that out philosophically.
One of the real problems for leftists is they’re explicitly going against fundamentals of human nature, e.g. trying to deny sex differences.

These impulses can be manipulated by ideologies. “Fairness” was the central tenet of old-liberalism before it curdled into communism. It simply requires controlling the information flow, and leaving out the important information that would lead one to question whether the recipients of welfare/immigration/etc. actually deserve the benefits they receive.

The idea that e.g. health care is a “right” may not sit well with you, and indeed it’s a highly twisted interpretation of “fairness”, but the progs who espouse it really do believe that what they’re advocating is fair.

Cognition is embodied: thinking being at variance with phenomenal reality leads to the mental disorders observed in modern progressives – cognitive dissonance, out to full blown mental illness. That healthcare isn’t a right is an observable fact not a matter of opinion and at some level everyone knows that unless they are completely insane. I don’t care about what people wish to believe, I care about what is true. Some opinions are quite literally valueless and deserve no consideration.